Racial gulf in colleges growing, report says

Thursday

Aug 1, 2013 at 12:01 AMAug 1, 2013 at 10:11 AM

The nation's system of higher education is growing more racially polarized even as it attracts more minorities: White students are increasingly clustering at selective institutions, while blacks and Latinos mostly are attending open-access and community colleges, according to a new report.

The nation’s system of higher education is growing more racially polarized even as it attracts more minorities: White students are increasingly clustering at selective institutions, while blacks and Latinos mostly are attending open-access and community colleges, according to a new report.

The paths offer widely disparate opportunities and are leading to widely disparate outcomes, said the report released yesterday by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington.

Students at the nation’s top 468 colleges are the beneficiaries of much more spending — anywhere from two to five times what is spent on instruction at open-access and community colleges. And students at top schools are far more likely to graduate than students from other institutions, even when they are equally prepared, according to the report. In addition, graduates of top schools are far more likely than others to go on to graduate school.

The financial implications of those differences are huge: A worker with an advanced degree is expected to earn an average of $2.1 million more in his or her life than a non-graduate, the report said. Also, the report said that graduates of selective colleges earn an average of $67,000 a year 10 years after graduation, about $18,000 a year more than graduates from nonselective schools.

“The American postsecondary system increasingly has become a dual system of racially separate pathways, even as overall minority access to the postsecondary system has grown dramatically,” said Jeff Strohl, the Georgetown center’s director of research, who co-authored the report.

The report focused on a comparison of whites with Latinos and African-American students. Data on the experiences of Asian-American and American Indian students were too limited for an identical analysis, the authors said.

The report raises disturbing questions about the effectiveness of higher-education policies aiming to encourage more Americans to attend college. President Barack Obama has talked about improved access to higher education as a means of closing the nation’s growing income inequality. But the report illustrates that higher education is doing more to replicate inequality than eliminate it.

For that to change, the report authors said, policymakers need to work harder to make the experience at non-selective schools more like that at selective ones. That means more spending for those schools, which often struggle with crowded classes and outdated equipment. It also would mean added financial support for students at non-selective schools, who spend more hours working and dealing with family responsibilities than students at selective colleges.

“It is a good-news, bad-news story,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, the report’s other co-author and director of Georgetown’s workforce center. “Access is up, and inequality is growing a lot with it. And the two are intimately connected.”

Between 1995 and 2009, college enrollment by new freshman more than doubled among Latinos, while it increased 73 percent among African-Americans and 15 percent among whites, who represent a shrinking share of the college-age population.

Those students are largely facing different college experiences. More than eight out of 10 of those new white students attended selective four-year schools, compared with 13 percent of Latinos and 9 percent of African-Americans, the report said. More than two in three African-Americans and nearly three in four Latinos went to open-access colleges, it said.

Overall, whites represent 75 percent of the students at the nation’s top 468 colleges, even though they account for only 62 percent of the nation’s college-age population. Whites make up only 57 percent of the students at open-access schools.

Blacks and Latinos account for 36 percent of students at open-access schools, and only 14 percent at selective four-year colleges. Blacks and Latinos make up one-third of the nation’s college-age population.